Oceanic Methods, Archipelagic Thinking, and Tidal Ethnographies

Catalog description

This seminar makes critical and urgent connections across environmental humanities and ethnographic methods through an archipelagic, and thus relational, mode of thinking. Blue humanities help us to think with the oceanic as a metaphor of connectivity. Beyond metaphor, we will be experimenting with the oceanic as a response to mobility and environmental change. How does the warming ocean shape the meaning and temporalities of risk? What methods are suitable in attending to shifting oceans that carry traces of refusal and survival? We will approach these questions through film, fiction, and poetry, as well as ethnographies of oceanic connections that strive to map this extremely dynamic site. This intersectional approach invites students to think beyond the oceanic space as an ontological other, and posits the oceanic mobilities as connecting tissue between resistance and survival.